[Editor's Note:The Conversations is a House feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. This is Part II of a discussion of Darren Aronofsky. Part I, covering his first four films, can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

Ed Howard: Jason, you ended the first half of our conversation about Darren Aronofsky by wondering both where the director would go next after his first four films and which Aronofsky would be represented in Black Swan, his fifth feature. Throughout that exchange, we mostly divided Aronofsky's career in half, considering Pi and Requiem for a Dream as blunt, bleak rehearsals for the more fully realized explorations of thematically similar territory in The Fountain and The Wrestler. So I suppose it's appropriate that for the first half of Black Swan, I found myself thinking I was watching another Requiem for a Dream, while the second half ventured into the richer, deeper territory of Aronofsky's more recent career. It's appropriate, too, that the film itself is so concerned with halving and doubling, with mirrors and doppelgangers, built as it is around a production of the ballet Swan Lake in which the dancer Nina (Natalie Portman) is asked to play the dual role of the Swan Queen and her dark rival, the titular Black Swan.

It's a fascinating film, and especially so in the context of Aronofsky's career, because it feels like such a consolidation of everything he's been exploring and dealing with in his other work. I haven't read any reviews of Black Swan yet, but I feel pretty confident predicting that at least a few of them will call it "The Wrestler in ballet slippers," or something similar, and they will be more or less accurate. As in The Wrestler and his other films, Aronofsky is exploring his protagonist's singleminded pursuit of her obsession, in this case Nina's pursuit of dancing perfection. As in The Wrestler, Aronofsky is recycling familiar cinematic clichés, drawing on the backstage movie's tropes of domineering mothers, neurotic stars, ambitious rivals, aging hasbeens, and predatory/sexual relationships between male directors and female performers. In working with these clichés, however, Aronofsky reinvests them with vitality and freshness through the raw intensity of his filmmaking.

Nina wants, desperately and obsessively, to be "perfect," though the film itself eschews this purity for grime, chaos and fragmentation, mocking Nina's desire to be perfect by running her through an increasingly harrowing gauntlet of real and imagined trials and terrors. Black Swan begins in methodical, observational realism and slowly morphs, like a woman becoming a swan, into a psychological horror film, a dizzying fever dream that haunts the audience and the central character alike. I'm still wrestling with this dense film, and I'm sure we'll delve more into its substance and its connections to Aronofsky's oeuvre throughout this conversation. But one thing I'm already sure of is that I can't forget this film; it's provocative and viscerally exciting and visually compelling. I haven't totally resolved my feelings about this film or its effect on me, but I'm already sure that it has affected me.

Jason Bellamy: I suppose this is only appropriate, given Black Swan's mirroring motif, but reading your account felt like seeing my own feelings reflected back at me. I couldn't agree more. Like you, I saw traces of Aronofsky's earlier and later films. Like you, I noted the multiple clichés and archetypes. Like you, I'm still struggling to make sense of it all—cerebrally and emotionally. But most important of all, like you I feel affected; and I'm grateful for that. Maybe it was all that White Swan/Black Swan split-personality stuff, but as Black Swan ended I found myself confronted by two outwardly identical but attitudinally opposed thoughts: "That was something... (?)" and "That was something... (!)." In other words, I can't yet tell you exactly what Black Swan is, exactly what it means to me, or exactly when the film is genius and when it's trite, but I can tell you that it got under my skin, that it's powerful in sum, if not incessantly, and that I expect its spell will linger.

Part of the reason I'm drunk on the film while still struggling to identify its taste has something to do with the film's hallucination-filled narrative. Black Swan is no extreme Lynchian mindfuck, in the sense that its broad themes are always easily understood, and by the end there's very little mystery left, as if there was never any mystery in the first place, but the film includes so many wild shifts and U-turns that experiencing it for the first time is like trying to balance on a seesaw in a windstorm. Over the second half of the film I was constantly recalibrating my understanding of what was happening: "OK, this scene isn't real, but the last one was... no, wait, now this scene is imagined, so the previous two must have been genuine... or, wait, hang on, maybe all of the last three scenes were hallucinations... but, then again..." Aronofsky is putting us into the troubled mind of Portman's Nina, who right up until the final moment never knows what to believe. And so Black Swan is appropriately discombobulating, even while it's thematically direct. But having said that, I think the main reason for my dizziness is because I'm astonished at how familiar the film feels throughout, only to leave me feeling as if I've never seen anything quite like it.

You already listed off several of the film's broad backstage drama clichés—domineering mothers, neurotic stars, etc.—but equally prevalent are the distinctive Aronofsky flourishes: a predilection for ghastliness that recalls Pi and Requiem for a Dream; a black-and-white (darkness and lightness) motif that recalls The Fountain (this time in reverse); the numerous follow-shots that recall The Wrestler; a general fondness for centered closeups that recalls all of his films; and so on. Maybe I'll stumble upon something later, but at the moment I can't think of anything about Black Swan that feels particularly new within Aronofsky's oeuvre, never mind within all of cinema. And yet somehow Black Swan feels so distinct, so individual. Am I alone in that feeling? If not, can you explain that?

EH: You're not alone, and I think Black Swan feels fresh, not so much for its individual elements as for its synthesis. As you say, Black Swan exists within the continuity of Aronofsky's career, and yet there's something bold and loose and appealingly ragged about the way Aronofsky mashes together his thematic and stylistic concerns here. Part of it is the film's destabilizing approach to reality; Aronofsky's first three films frequently diverged into fantasy, or blended the real and the unreal, but never so startlingly as here, where Nina often seems to be leaping jarringly from one form of hallucination into another. There's also the fact that Aronofsky increasingly seems like a realist director who can't help rendering fantasy and illusion with a realist's eye for detail. When Nina picks at her skin and, at one point, suddenly peels off a whole strip of flesh from around her fingernail, it's as viscerally disturbing as Harry's festering needle wound in Requiem for a Dream; when it's revealed as fantasy an eyeblink later, it doesn't make it feel any less tangible. The Wrestler aside, Aronofsky's films, and especially Black Swan, are strikingly concrete approaches to the abstract and the internal. Aronofsky renders Nina's unstable dreamworld as a physical place, which only makes the sudden intrusions of Nina's imagined horrors all the more disorienting.

The film opens with a hazy sequence of Nina dancing the role of the Swan Queen, swathed in white light in the center of a dark space. Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be a dream, and Aronofsky follows it with a sequence of Nina waking up, contrasting the surreal qualities of the dream against the slow dawning of natural light on Nina's pale face, then focusing on the cracking of the joints in her toes, and the way she languidly stretches her neck, then cuts to her practicing ballet in front of a mirror and enthusing over the pinkness of a grapefruit. This sequence suggests, comfortingly, that the film is making a rigid distinction between the unreality of dreams and the prosaic corporeality of waking life, but in fact no such distinction exists. This film feels real even when its events are obviously surreal; it has that in common with David Lynch, who's an obvious touchstone for Aronofsky here. Black Swan is a sister to Lynch's Mulholland Drive, another film in which professional rivalry leads to lesbian desire, all of it tangled up in narcissism and questions of identity, and all of it heading towards violence, murder, and horror-movie flourishes.

What makes this so interesting is that, despite the film's constant and purposeful confusion of illusion with reality, the film's fantastic imagery is all in service to the deeper themes of identity and ambition. Nina finds doubles everywhere because she's being pulled in so many different directions at once, and because her life is already so full of potential doppelgangers: her controlling mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), who once had a less-than-successful dancing career of her own and now passive-aggressively encourages and demeans her daughter; Beth (Winona Ryder), the aging star whose place Nina is now taking; Lily (Mila Kunis), the rival dancer who is Nina's opposite in so many ways and the obvious Black Swan to Nina's White Swan; and of course the dark, smirking doppelganger who Nina keeps catching glimpses of out of the corner of her eye (Portman again). Over the course of the film, Nina keeps confusing herself with these other selves, and confusing them with one another, so that her rival becomes her lover, who becomes herself, who becomes her mother, who appears briefly as Beth, enraged that Nina is taking on the career she once had and should have kept. The film is such a pulse-pounding rollercoaster ride because it places us so completely into Nina's subjectivity, seeing everything through her eyes, seeing how her intense desire to become a star dancer has made her own identity unstable, fluidly blending into the other women in her life.

JB: That's true, and maybe that hints at another reason this film feels so similar-to-yet-different-from Aronofsky's other films: its preponderance of female characters. Here the roles for Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder and Mila Kunis are relatively small and insignificant—Portman's Nina is the only one whose feelings count— but this is still a female-dominated film, which is a first for Aronofsky, whose previous films maxed out at two semi-substantial female characters each (if that). Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that because Black Swan is about a female's experience that the movie is about the Female Experience, because I don't think that's the case. From any other director, sure, I might be inclined to think that Black Swan is a specific metaphor for the metamorphosis from girlhood into womanhood—complete with unrealistic expectations for physical perfection, shame about sexual yearnings and even frustration with sporadic bleeding. But given Aronofsky's body of work, Black Swan strikes me as another film about obsession—one that draws upon those female maturation stereotypes but isn't about them. No doubt, I suspect many women could look at Nina, with her overprotective mother, her stuffed animals on the bed and her ballerina music box, and remember the period of adolescence when the Little Princess identity of childhood no longer aligned with maturing desires (sexual and otherwise). But Black Swan is so much more universal than that, because as much as it's about obsession, it's also about suppression—about bottling up who we are, or who we want to be, or who we could be, in order to meet outward expectations.

We talked about all the ways that Black Swan feels familiar, even recycled, but maybe the thing it does with singular superiority is make emotional suppression palpable. Black Swan achieves this palpability in a number of ways, but the lion's share of the credit must go to Portman. Aronofsky's film is terrifically cast from top to bottom, and we'll get to some of the other performances later, but Portman's turn as Nina is the most remarkable if for no other reason than because it dupes us (or at least me) into believing that when Portman embodies Nina's repressed White Swan that she is acting according to type, when nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe I'm alone here, but I think most of us tend to pigeonhole Portman as some kind of Puritanical spirit, even though her career has defied that image with surprising consistency. Consider that in her first three films—The Professional (1994), Heat (1995) and especially Beautiful Girls (1996)—Portman played a character who was dealing with issues beyond the expected demands of her age. In Closer (2004) she played a conniving stripper. In Wes Anderson's short Hotel Chevalier (2007), she played an emotionally manipulative (ex)girlfriend. Meantime, she's mocked her wholesome image with a bleep-heavy rap on an SNL Digital Short. I could go on. Point is, Inhibited Nina should seem against-type for Portman, yet Portman wears the character so well that it would be easy to take her performance for granted. Throughout Black Swan, Aronofsky often evokes Nina's emotional suppression via the soundtrack, by enhancing the sound of Nina's breathing, or pumping up the intensity of Clint Mansell's score as Nina gives in to her desires, only to take the score away when Nina's self-regulating instinct kicks in. But Aronofksy's most effective technique for evoking emotional suppression is to point his camera at Portman, who through her countenance and posture suggests a woman so bottled-up that at any moment she might explode. It's a sneakily terrific performance.

EH: Yes, Portman is always at the center of this film, much as Mickey Rourke was in The Wrestler, and she responds by delivering a fantastic performance. Even in the early scenes, before we really understand what this character is about, there's something strained and fake about the way she smiles and exclaims happily over a grapefruit breakfast with her mom; the cracks in her personality are so deep that they show even in the most prosaic details of her life. As the film progresses and Nina's grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, Portman's tight, neurotic smiles and flustered reactions to the outpourings of her imagination convey the sense of a girl who is genuinely scared of what's inside her, genuinely terrified of loosening her grip on all the emotions and desires she's suppressed for so long. It's this aspect of the film that resonates most strongly with the girl-into-woman theme. It's as though Nina is going through a delayed puberty, having long repressed her desires and her sexuality, probably at the not-so-subtle urging of a mother who obviously feels that her own sexuality—and the child that resulted from it—was a career-ending mistake. Aronofsky enhances this performance by placing the audience into the same position as Portman's Nina, unsure of what's real and what's not, unable to get a steady foothold within the flow of fantasy and reality.

The film begins to slip between subjective visions and concrete reality, allowing identities to fluidly slide into one another. Nina's mother becomes Beth, Nina's metaphoric mother and predecessor within the dance company. Nina vacillates between virginal White Swan and angry, ravenous Black Swan. But the really complicated tension/fusion is the one between Nina and Lily—Lily with those black wings tattooed on her back, marking her out as embodying the darkness, freedom and sexual liberation of the Black Swan. (An interesting question is whether the wings are even really there, or if that's just how Nina sees her rival; this film makes us question everything.) Lily becomes the external incarnation of the dark self lurking within Nina—and when Nina gets in touch with her own inner Black Swan, during the opening night performance of the ballet, she no longer needs Lily, and symbolically murders her. But before that performance finally shatters the last bonds of Nina's restraint, she does need Lily as a dark doppelganger. When Nina returns home from partying with Lily, Lily seems to be there in the hallway—in a stunning, graceful shot of a segmented mirror, Lily seems to be splitting away from Nina, emerging from within her, the two girls separated by the mirror's segmentation. As the drunken Nina taunts her mother, Lily skulks off to the side, mouthing the aggressive, confrontational words that then come out of Nina's mouth. Just as earlier, Lily had first appeared at a crucial moment to disrupt Nina's Black Swan tryout, as a physical manifestation of Nina's discomfort with the dance, here Lily is again giving voice to the emotions lurking beneath Nina's tightly constrained exterior.

When they go to the bedroom and Lily starts to go down on Nina, Nina periodically sees the other girl with her own face, as though she's devouring herself, pleasuring herself—something she'd been typically embarrassed about earlier. And then, recalling the scene where Nina had been mortified to realize her mother was in the room with her while she was masturbating, the other girl, looking like Nina, calls her "sweet girl," like her mother does, and smothers her with a pillow, the way Nina is metaphorically smothered by her real mother. This slippage continues, with Nina going to the hospital to see Beth, only to have Beth attack herself, repeatedly stabbing her own face with a blade (being pecked with a beak?) while screaming that she's "nothing," and then when Nina runs away she finds the bloody knife in her own bloody hands. This dissociation is wonderfully expressed in all the mirror shots where Nina's reflection seems to be behaving independently of her. In the studio, late at night, her reflection continues to turn pirouettes after Nina has stopped, at first moving in subtly different ways, just a few beats off of Nina's own motion, and then increasingly diverging. Later, she sees a hand in the mirror scratching her back, but it's not one of her own hands, which remain at her sides: it's one of the multiple reflections stretched out behind her, a different self reaching out to touch her. Her personality is fragmenting into two, splitting apart, the White Swan and the Black Swan within her becoming defined as two independent selves within one body, just as her role demands of her.

JB: It's an interesting metamorphosis. By the final shot of the film, Nina has gone the way of Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond—and considering that Nina begins the film as a longtime supporting player thirsting to be recognized just once, who could have seen that coming? As Nina gazes up into the stage lights, basking in the glory of the performance in which she transcends technique to become a true dancer, apparently oblivious of her self-inflicted abdominal wound, she is a portrait of euphoria and tragedy, not unlike our final glimpse of Jennifer Connelly's Marion in Requiem for a Dream, actually. In Part I of this discussion I praised Aronofsky's ability to end a movie with a wallop, and Black Swan continues his reputation: Just before Nina's swan dive, she strikes a dramatic crucifixion pose that recalls the final shot of The Wrestler. And before that, Aronofsky's camera swings around the stage as Nina loses herself to the dance amidst Mansell's appropriately whirling interpretation of Tchaikovsky's original score. And just before that, Portman has what might be her most magical moment, when Nina, having just found a shard of glass in her stomach, realizes that her biggest enemy all along has been herself; Portman's face first registers pain, then terror, then emotional exhaustion and then, in one brief moment, peace. As Nina dabs her tears into her heavily powdered cheeks, it marks the first, and really only, time that we can see both the timid White Swan and the confident Black Swan in the same expression. It's a "Wow!" moment.

And of course it's a challenging moment, too. As with Max in Pi and Randy in The Wrestler, it's tough to know how to feel about Nina's fate. The last shot might be out of Sunset Boulevard, but the shot of Nina at the makeup counter affords her a moment of exultation and liberation. Aronofsky has a habit of treating his characters with brutality, always pulling the rug out from under them, never allowing them anything approaching an idyllic happy ending, but with the exception of Requiem for a Dream his characters are almost always afforded a measure of triumph in the end. That it comes at such a high price in some ways makes it all the more rewarding. It's as if Aronofsky is breaking down his characters so that eventually they might transcend their limits. In that sense, you could consider Black Swan an even more visceral cousin of David Fincher's The Game. What's real? What's fake? What does it matter, if it knocks down your defense, opens you up, cleanses you of your fears and makes you cherish the moment in front of you as if it's your last? (And in Nina's case, it might be.) As dark and depressing as Black Swan might seem, it's kind of uplifting too. Isn't it?

EH: I think so, too. The final twenty minutes of the film, during the ballet performance, are downright exhilarating. Even knowing, logically, how tragic and bleak this ending is, I can't help getting swept up in the glory of Nina's performance, can't help feeling awed and excited as she becomes, before my eyes, the wild, forceful Black Swan that she was suppressing beneath her good girl exterior for so long. Aronofsky has been building patiently towards this moment throughout the film, showing Nina's struggles with injecting the proper level of intensity and energy into the role of the Black Swan. She becomes so invested in it that I do, too, so that by the end I'm cheering her on even as she transforms into this dark version of herself, destroying herself in the process. As she whirls around the stage, widening her eyes into a piercing stare, she sprouts feathers from her arms and shoulders, eventually taking a grand bow with full wings sloping up into the air over her head. Throughout the dance, in addition to the music, Aronofsky layers the sounds of rustling feathers into the soundtrack, the sound of Nina's wings flapping around her as she prepares to take flight. Aronofsky, to his credit, allows the transformation to happen, via CGI, in a single long shot, not belaboring it but simply allowing the surreal shift to occur fluidly, until Nina, for her brief moment of glory, has fully inhabited the role of the Black Swan.

It's exciting, because it's exciting filmmaking, and because Portman's Nina is so consistently neurotic and indrawn that it's gratifying to see her breaking free of those restrictions, even if it means the loss of her sanity and, quite possibly, her life. That is, of course, a typical Aronofsky theme. All of his characters have one thing they care about more than living itself, and all of them pursue these obsessions to an unhealthy degree. Black Swan fits neatly into the rest of Aronofsky's oeuvre, at least thematically. Aronofsky even nods back to his first film with the scene where Nina, riding the subway, encounters a creepy old man who makes kissy faces at her and touches his crotch; it's hard to say with any certainty, but it seems likely that he's another manifestation of her subconscious, expressing her discomfort with sexuality. In any event, this man is played by the same actor, Stanley Herman, who taunted Max on the train in Pi. It's like Aronofsky is winking at the audience, acknowledging the continuity of his stories, enforcing the linkage between driven, damaged Nina and her predecessors in his work.

JB: No question about it. Likewise, the grapefruit shot is a wink back at Requiem for a Dream. And of course the aforementioned follow shots and the crucifixion pose reminds of The Wrestler. Speaking of which, when we discussed The Wrestler I asked you whether it was primarily Aronofsky's movie or Rourke's. You said both. I said that when push comes to shove it will always be Rourke's movie to me, for all the meta reasons if nothing else—the way Rourke's performance nods back to his previous roles on screen, in the ring and in life. But Black Swan is different. I've already praised Portman's performance, and rightfully so, but this is always Aronofsky's movie—because he nods back to his own previous films, and because of Black Swan's familiar blend of showy technique and utter fearlessness. In Part I we discussed how Aronofsky's films sometimes seem to play underneath a neon sign proclaiming "This movie is directed!" and the same could be said about Black Swan, but maybe the thing we overlooked about of Aronofsky's in-your-face tactics is the brazenness, almost arrogance, of his filmmaking as a whole. In that sense, Aronofsky is a lot like Quentin Tarantino. And maybe that's why Black Swan reminds me of my reaction to Inglourious Basterds. Make no mistake, I think Tarantino's film is the richer of the two. But both films delight in mishmashing styles and in going beyond edgy into the completely outrageous. Not quite camp, but not far off.

Ha! On that I (sadly) agree.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-16 02:40:16

Actually Jason I wish you WOULD wander into the Oval Office -- as it's apparently unoccupied.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-15 23:38:10

On a related note, two weeks ago I had a drug induced dream that I was President of the United States. So I suppose I can just wander right into the Oval Office.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-15 19:45:30

She gets Lily "cofused with herself" when Lily goes down on her? Neat! "I'm not gay -- I was just masturbating." I'm sure Kevin Spacey will find that very useful.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-15 17:13:16

David: I can't really lay it out better than Ed did. So I'll just second his comment above.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-15 15:14:29

Jason, it's screamingly obvious. She's "getting in touch with her desires as a lesbian, Ed.
I don't know why all the film's admirers have been chary of acknowledging the Big Pink Elephant in the Bedroom -- and I'm not talking about her stuffed toys.
Needless to say this is the faux lebianism of straight male fantasy. But there it is.
Live with it!Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-15 05:16:34

Nina discovers that she has sexual desires she's been repressing. She discovers that she has a certain hardness and darkness in her that she never suspected was there. She discovers that she no longer wants to be treated like a little girl. She does not discover she's a lesbian; the sex scene is about getting in touch with desire, in general, not necessarily a specifically lesbian desire. Hell, the fact that she keeps getting Lily confused with herself suggests that the sex scene is as much about getting comfortable with her own sexuality as it is about desiring another person.Posted by Ed Howard on 2010-12-15 01:40:38

David: Do you think Nina discovers she's a lesbian? Really?Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-15 00:32:46

The Black Swan is a "Werewolf Picture" if you think that discovering that you're a lesbian is analgous to turning into a werewolf.
I suspect Aronofsky thinks this is so.
Or more to the point acting like he thinks this is so makes for "great drama."Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-15 00:02:54

Lots of great stuff here. First looping back to a comment I missed from Carson:
Aside from this diversion though, I don't see the moments of "lightness", "happiness", and "euphoria" Jason mentions in his second-to-last paragraph. Black Swan seemed unremittingly grim, even with its bouts of dark humor. Is this what you're referring to?
In the context of any other director's work, "unremittingly grim" would seem right on. But compared to Pi or Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan seems almost sunny. In places, I mean. To some degree the happiness I'm referring to is the feeling Aronofsky conjures with Nina's quasi-triumph. I know some might not see any triumph at all, but Ed and I were both swept up in her transformation into the Black Swan, dark though the imagery is. This, for me, is different than Requiem in which the characters are sometimes happy but it's always obvious that they're on a collision course with doom, so it's a false happiness. That's the comparison I was attempting to make, perhaps not too well.
More recent comments ...
David: I can't take credit for the Images comparison. That goes to Bruce.
Marilyn: Indeed, ballet is a field in which one is acutely in touch with one's body, and other people are constantly touching and manipulating in class and on stage; notice how Thomas' pawing of her in rehearsal doesn't cause her to flinch at all, even though he's obviously sexually harassing her. Or is he? The boundaries aren't that carefully drawn in dance, and dancers put up with an awful lot.
Love it! I still stand by the idea that this film isn't about ballet, but you've certainly convinced me that 'backstage ballet' is more than just an incidental setting.
Andrew: Little girls can still make it someday, but women are either on top of the world or past their prime ... Black Swan is therefore the tale of "someday" becoming "now," and the imperative that Nina recognize that this is her moment.
Yes! Exactly! Here's where Nina's multiple disagreements with her mother come in. She looks down on her mom for 'not making it.' And how did she 'not make it'? By either (a) just getting old (Nina's assessment) or (b) giving it all up to have a child (her mother's assessment). Whether it's "a" or "b," both of those things suggest that not growing up is essential to never growing old and heading over the proverbial hill (which comes early for dancers).
I also love the suggestion that this is a "werewolf picture." Scroll up and look at that image of Nina picking sprouting quills out of her back ... that's werewolf all the way! I'm smiling now ... maybe we can place Black Swan next to Unbreakable as a kind of drawn out origin story. Perhaps "Black Swan" will show up as a villain in Aronofsky's upcoming Wolverine installment! That would kick ass!Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-14 22:42:39

I haven't seen anyone else approach the film from this angle, but to me Black Swan is clearly Aronofsky's take on the "Werewolf Picture." Consider: Only the schlockiest action-oriented werewolf movies are ultimately about werewolves; any werewolf movie worth its salt is "really" about the protagonist-victim, and the sexuality, anger, assertiveness, or whathaveyou that the character is repressing. Whatever form the werewolf mumbo-jumbo takes, the movie is "really" about a character coming to terms with a hidden, repressed side of themselves and dealing with the fallout (physical, emotional, spiritual) that results when a long-repressed aspect of the self runs wild. It is incidental that Black Swan is about an avian rather than lupine transformation, and that the imagined "transformation" itself is plainly one piece of a broader, delusional journey: The film pretty closely hews to the emotional rhythms of a Werewolf Picture, albeit filtered through the influence of Polanski, De Palma, and Cronenberg.Posted by Andrew Wyatt on 2010-12-14 17:38:56

Jason:
"Nina has resisted growing up, possibly because so long as she's just a little girl, she's still an up-and-comer in the world of ballet, with room to dream that her best years are ahead of her."
Here you provide one of the most intriguing observations in this whole piece to me, and one of the better insights into the heroine's character: The notion that Nina is comfortable in the role of the virginal little girl--even though she is a late twenty-something--because it provides the illusion of potential. I think that Black Swan is at least partly about Nina finally realizing that this sexually and emotionally stunted role she is living--the White Nina, if you will--is just that, a role, and not really representative of who she is at bottom. It might have its limitations--reliance on her mother, a lack of sexual pleasure, the inaccessibility of certain roles--but it's just *easy* in a weird way, and comfortable, because it jibes with the mythology or narrative that Nina is constructing around her life: she is going to make it someday. Little girls can still make it someday, but women are either on top of the world or past their prime, in Nina's view (a view enforced by her female-populated but male-dominated environs). Black Swan is therefore the tale of "someday" becoming "now," and the imperative that Nina recognize that this is her moment. (Throughout much of the film, I wanted to shout at Nina, "This is it! You're on the cusp of making it! That moment you've been waiting your whole life for? It's now! Don't fuck it up!") The psychological tension underlying the story hinges on whether Nina can let go of the White Nina identity that has arguably served her well (as a survival tactic, if nothing else) but now acts as a stumbling block to her ascendancy to the pinnacle of her art form. This whole line of thinking reminded me, oddly enough, of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. There's a lot going on in that picture, but I see the psychological story as one of Scott's realization that the Put-Upon Loser persona he's adopted and made a part of his life's narrative is a con he's pulling on himself and those around him. Like Nina, he's comfortable with this role, even though it makes him miserable, and he's in desperate need of a jolt if he's going to evolve as a person.Posted by Andrew Wyatt on 2010-12-14 17:26:22

I agree with David about the importance of the setting to the film; obviously, since I was most put off by its lack of regard for ballet as a career. Indeed, ballet is a field in which one is acutely in touch with one's body, and other people are constantly touching and manipulating in class and on stage; notice how Thomas' pawing of her in rehearsal doesn't cause her to flinch at all, even though he's obviously sexually harassing her. Or is he? The boundaries aren't that carefully drawn in dance, and dancers put up with an awful lot.
But Aronofsky isn't really interested in dance, only in Nina's mind, which does push the setting to the back. I've been told I've been too literal about the film and should have just let myself go (like Nina?) and enjoy the hallucinatory vitality. Is this Aronofsky's challenge then, to push people out of narrative and go into a free fall of expressionism, to become as delirious with the results of Nina's imaginings as she became while dancing the Black Swan?Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-14 16:19:38

The Black Swan provkes comparasion to other ballet films because despite the fact that it devolves into a psychological horror film (your comparasion to Altman's nearly-forgotten Images to mind is most apropos, Jason) its about a young woman's dedication to a ballet career. ALL ballet drama pivot on their repective heroine's dedication. (Or hero's as in the case of Herbert Ross' pretty but botched Nijinsky)Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-14 13:34:58

I would if he weren't convincingly one. I don't recall having that problem with The Pianist.
True. But I wonder if what's convincing about The Pianist is that it's so easy to disguise nonexpert piano playing (just hide the actor's hands in wide shots, and cut to the hand-double for closeups) that TV/cinema use these tricks all the time, and we've just grown used to them and give them a pass.
One of the things I think is interesting about the comments here -- and indeed other reviews I've been reading in the past few days -- is how determined everyone seems to be (Ed and I included, I guess) to compare Black Swan with other ballet films. I'm not saying that's out of bounds. But we all seem to agree that Black Swan and The Company don't have similar aims, so in some respect comparing them is a bit like comparing A Perfect Storm and Titanic because they both involve bad ocean voyage experiences. Ballet is the setting for Black Swan, nothing more. I mean, nobody here thinks that Aronofsky is trying to say "this is what ballet does to people!" or "this is what ballet looks like!" right?
But we make these comparisons anyway, because (1) the world of ballet has been captured so rarely (relatively speaking) and (2) ballet is so distinct that it's hard to resist making connections; this happens in sports movies, too, where movie fans always seem to feel the need compare every boxing movie, every baseball movie, etc., no matter how seriously or not the movie takes the sport itself.
Speaking of which: Sports fans often cite Fear Strikes Out as impossible to watch, because Athony Perkins plays a baseball player despite not being able to throw a baseball with any hint of athleticism. So I do think it's fair, to a point, to be disappointed that there isn't more genuine ballet in this "ballet movie," if that's what we're going to call it. But, personally, I'd rather Aronofsky avoid Portman's technique, rather than giving scene after scene in which mediocre dancing is passed off as the real thing. Overall, though, here's a case where I think that categorizing Black Swan as a ballet movie is, in a nod to something Ed said above, no more informative than calling Pi a math movie.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-14 13:23:30

Jason Bellamy: "I don't think any of us would dish on The Pianist because Brody isn't a classical musician."
I would if he weren't convincingly one. I don't recall having that problem with The Pianist; but it's been a few years.
"Nina might only be imagining things, but it's her world … so it's her vision that counts."
Fair enough. Brava!
David Ehrenstein: "I hope these films supporters have seen Altman's The Company."
Several times. It's a better film than Black Swan, and a much better dance film. But since the point of Black Swan is, as you put it, "the heroine's dawning dementia," surely the better point of comparison would be Images (point still to Altman) or, especially given the virginal sexual anxiety Marilyn deftly zeroed in upon, That Cold Day in The Park (in which case, I'd have to give the edge to Aronofsky).Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-14 07:02:26

The Company does have its charms, but it's hard to think of a better example of a dance film that exists, more or less, only for its dancing. Which is OK, for as far as it goes. The dance sequences are nice, and some of them are downright stunning, but there's nothing much to it beyond that. (Of course, some would say that Black Swan is similarly insubstantial, I know.) The Altman film has got some undeniably good scenes though, especially that memorable outdoor dance in a thunderstorm. There's also a nice, surprising tribute to David Lynch in the form of a dance set to a Julee Cruise tune.Posted by Ed Howard on 2010-12-14 03:47:24

I hope these films supporters have seen Altman's The Company. Neve Campbell is no Moira Sherer and Lar Lubovitch no Helppman or Massine, but she DOES actually dance in the film, and the dances are quite nice. More to the point, Altman pulls away from the extremes of melodrama to focus on the day-to-day grind of being a dancer with a major company. Campbell gets her "Big Break" by being given the lead role in the "My Funny Valentine" ballet. But it's not at all like "The Ballet of The Red Shoes." It's a simple, romantic dance, nicely delivered. She isn't involved with the head of the company (well-played by Malcolm McDowell) in any way other than professional. And she starts a nice little romance on the side with the now-inescapable James Franco, who plays a chef in a restuarant where she works as a waitress to support her dancing career.
Give it a look.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-14 02:42:33

Great conversation guys! I wasn't a fan of this film in particular (it coasted on the side of manipulative and redundant to me), but it's been a pleasure to read your back-and-forth. Your reading of the film as a summation of Darren Aronofsky's career so far is well argued, but I see it a retread of his older work, the more shocking side of his persona. I don't like the strict subjectivity of the film so much because I think it makes the supporting players into mere objects of Nina's fear rather than the well-rounded characters they could have been. As for the gaudier qualities, they didn't do much for me, but I did especially love the shout-out to Pi via the man on the subway - surely my favorite moment of the film. This goes a long way toward making me think Aronofsky has gained a little bit of self-critique.
Aside from this diversion though, I don't see the moments of "lightness", "happiness", and "euphoria" Jason mentions in his second-to-last paragraph. Black Swan seemed unremittingly grim, even with its bouts of dark humor. Is this what you're referring to?
To David Ehrenstein: I don't see how this heavy-handed comparison to The Red Shoes is particularly helpful to the conversation. Yes, both films are about dance and obsession. Need we say more? There's no need to beat Black Swan over the head with the clearly superior Powell and Pressburger film. I think Aronofsky, even for his shortcomings, is after different things here. So what if he "does not know how to shoot ballet"? Is that a prerequisite for good filmmaking?Posted by Carson Lund on 2010-12-14 01:29:16

I agree that the ovation was way over the top, and could have functioned as a hallucination, or a joke on us by indulging in the Ruby Keeler cliche: "Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!"Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-14 00:00:44

Not Lily, Beth!
Ah, Beth! Right! Different scene. Now I'm with you. Sticking with Marilyn ...
I almost think Nina was in a squeeze play between her and her mother's collusion to retain her innocence and Thomas' desire to pop her cherry ... The myth about losing your virginity and gaining your creative force is both seductive and brutal to people who need to find their own way to express themselves.
I think that's very well said, Marilyn.
As for the debate about The Red Shoes being more of a dancer's movie ... well, sure. Because there's a real dancer in it. But if that film is even more about "artistic commitment unto death," per David's argument, then how important is the validity of the dancing? Don't get me wrong: Part of the joy of The Red Shoes is the legitimacy of the ballet. I agree. And in the so-many scenes in which Portman is shot from the waist up it's glaring, in a potentially spell-breaking way, that Aronofsky is covering for Portman's deficiencies. (Then again: Considering how much Aronofsky loves closeups, you could almost argue that he'd have preferred to shoot her from the waist up anyway.) Point being, since Polanski has been mentioned in this thread, I don't think any of us would dish on The Pianist because Brody isn't a classical musician.
Bruce "McRib" Reid: It's funny to me that while we're all agreed the final sequence of the movie spins from hallucination to hallucination, everyone seems convinced that the final triumph is genuine ... I don't think there's a "true" answer to what transpired on stage that evening, but I think it just as likely that those beaming faces (mother most emphatically highlighted) were actually confused and/or incredulous at the curiously flubbed performance, concerned whispers and possibly even boos drowned out in Nina's head by the beating of her furious wings.
Though I didn't end up mentioning it, I had the same thought. It's absolutely possible. I think the shot of Nina's beaming mom is suspect; but I also think it doesn't matter. As we all agree, Nina is an unreliable witness of her own life. And I think the shot of Nina's mom is significant only to the point that Aronofsky affords that moment of harmony and warmth, which in his early films he seemed determine to snuff out. Nina might only be imagining things, but it's her world ... so it's her vision that counts.
Thanks for the comments, all.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-13 23:37:16

It's funny to me that while we're all agreed the final sequence of the movie spins from hallucination to hallucination, everyone seems convinced that the final triumph is genuine. As if in surrendering to her fever dreams Nina reached her apex as a dancer, whereas all previous illusions had been undermining her bodily control, sending her wiry frame into uncontrollable shivers and spastic jerks, at one point even knocking her pins out from under her; what greater betrayal for a dancer than legs that won't stay straight, let alone bend backwards? I don't think there's a "true" answer to what transpired on stage that evening, but I think it just as likely that those beaming faces (mother most emphatically highlighted) were actually confused and/or incredulous at the curiously flubbed performance, concerned whispers and possibly even boos drowned out in Nina's head by the beating of her furious wings.
But I confess I see Black Swan as essentially comic to begin with, inverting the star-is-born tradition to assert that sometimes cowards are better off remaining that way. Aronofsky seems to have taken Cassel's advice to heart, to surprise yourself is the best way to surprise your audience, and it gives the film the welcome lightness to which both Jason and Ed refer. I'm not as enamored with it as many--those floating waist-up shots really underscore how correct Marilyn is that the movie cares very little about its own heroine's overriding obsession--but even if it never gave me gooseflesh it's still a fun ride. And without it we wouldn't have had the delight of 30 Rock's "Black Swan/Black Swann" Christmas costume.
Marilyn Ferdinand: "The first [hallucination] she has is of the portraits moving, signaling very early that she's not really experiencing what she and we think she is."
Before that she's already flinched at seeing herself striding confidently out of the dark, and Ed points out that lecher on the subway could easily be another manifestation. But absolutely, Aronofsky's method is pretty much the inverse of Polanski's, for all the nods to Repulsion.Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-13 21:59:49

Actaully while The Red Shoes would appear to be "a dancer's movie," it has thrilled moviegeors with limited or minimal interest in dance for decades. It's about artistic commitment unto death.
The Black Swan flirts with that idea, but only up to a point. For the emphasis is on the heroine's dawning dementia. That alters the concept considerably.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-13 19:25:35

Yup, Ed, Tony Dayoub commented about dancers liking Black Swan less than nondancers. I would be in the former camp, and certainly the craving to see some good dancing filmed well was frustrating for me and people like me; I sympathize with David's complaint while not exactly sharing it and understanding why Aronofsky did what he did and cast who he cast. It's sad that the age of the triple threat is over, and directors looking for great acting feel they need to train film actors to dance in order to get the performances they want. It might behoove them to look to Broadway, where dancers who can act are fairly plentiful and often out of work.
But the more problematic point for me was that Nina was a dance professional, and the film didn't take her career and interpretive skills very seriously. Women in the performing arts are between a rock and a hard place. If you're Miley Cyrus, people want you to lose your innocence so they can berate you for it. The very sad plea Sandy sings in Grease, "no more Sandra Dee," is more about the pressure to lose your innocence rather than a self-directed desire to grow up. I almost think Nina was in a squeeze play between her and her mother's collusion to retain her innocence and Thomas' desire to pop her cherry. I'm not so sure Nina was really hoping he'd seduce her; clearly, he knew she wasn't ready and sent her home. The myth about losing your virginity and gaining your creative force is both seductive and brutal to people who need to find their own way to express themselves.Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-13 19:14:24

Marilyn, good point about the nail file's identity and its significance in that particular hallucination. When Nina sees Beth stabbing herself while shouting, "I'm nothing," it's clearly an act of transference, with Nina mapping her own feelings of inadequacy and self-disgust onto her predecessor. So the fact that that's a nail file and not the generic blade I'd assumed it was does add some resonance. Anyway, I'm glad you got something out of this convo even though we obviously had very different reactions to this film. I thought your points about the film's simplistic psychology and reliance on stereotypes were very interesting, and I can't deny that the film is basically a big blender of cliches, drawn from movies and Freud and pop culture and what-have-you. In some ways, I enjoyed it for starting from that unpromising foundation and then just running headlong, stylishly and enjoyably, into the depths implied by those starting points. I can see why others would just be turned off by it, though, which may be why the film seems to inspire either giddy enjoyment or near-total distaste, with precious little middle ground.
I agree with you, contra David, that the dancing is not the central emphasis here. That's why the comparisons to The Red Shoes are imperfect - that was more of a dancers' movie, whereas Black Swan, like all of Aronofsky's movies, is about obsession. The dancing is a venue in which these issues can be worked out visually and tangibly, like the wrestling in The Wrestler or the mathematics of Pi. I thought the dancing scenes worked well, especially the final Black Swan dance, though I'm willing to admit it could just be that I have very little knowledge of dancing in any way. I think it was you, or maybe someone at your site, who mentioned that those with some connection to dance tended to enjoy this film much less than those without that reference point.Posted by Ed Howard on 2010-12-13 18:32:47

Jason - Not Lily, Beth! What you identify above as a knife was a nail file.Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-13 16:58:32

Only have a moment, but I had to jump on this one:
And to make a correction that bears on your analysis, the item Beth stabbed herself with was a metal nail file. Given Nina's compulsive scratching and Erica's attempts to keep her from harming herself, this object's true identity has some significance, and is clearly another hallucination that feeds into her individual problems with her own imperfection, tying well with the cuticle picking and ripping away of the strip of flesh.
Wow! Given that Nina stabs "Lily" -- but really herself -- with a piece of mirrored glass, I was sure that's what Nina pulls out of her stomach later. But if it's a nail file, well, yeah, that certainly has a distinct significance. Marilyn, I'm hesitant to doubt you, but I must admit I need to see that scene again to be sure, simply because in my mind I see a piece of of the mirror. I'm having my own Nina hallucination, I guess. But assuming you're correct, thanks for pointing that out!
(OK. More later tonight.)Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2010-12-13 16:48:18

Well that's the problem Ms. Ferdiand. The Red Shoes is a film about obsession too. But dancers acted the key roles -- and danced them too. That makes for all the difference.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-13 16:45:11

Hi Ed and Jason,
It's an honor to be mentioned in "The Conversations," a series I have greatly admired from its inception. What you do is such a deep dive into the films and careers of your subjects, and, as usual, you have given Black Swan the royal treatment, which my review does not. I'm not very familiar with Aronofsky's themes or methods, having only seen two of his films, so I appreciate that you found more in this film than I do based on a certain connoisseurship of his work. I appreciate that he is obsessed, if you will, with obsession, and that he has chosen to depict an infantile woman who wants to be perfect; such girls do exist, and they are often anorexic. I suppose I should be happy that he chose to downplay that part of her backstory, using ballet in place of obsessive exercising.
And to make a correction that bears on your analysis, the item Beth stabbed herself with was a metal nail file. Given Nina's compulsive scratching and Erica's attempts to keep her from harming herself, this object's true identity has some significance, and is clearly another hallucination that feeds into her individual problems with her own imperfection, tying well with the cuticle picking and ripping away of the strip of flesh.
I was indeed drawn in the more numerous the hallucinations became, but none of them really upset me. The first one she has is of the portraits moving, signaling very early that she's not really experiencing what she and we think she is. That takes the edge off the suspense off the spiraling madness and is just the opposite of how Polanski built horror in Repulsion, with DeNeuve's character not seeing the rotting food and corpses around her.
And frankly, the points I made about Aronofsky's simplistic, Freudian blame game completely threw me out of the picture. I enjoyed it, but it made no real impression on me and seemed, as I said to someone, a very jejeune film for a man in his 40s to make.
As for Mr. Ehrenstein's objections about the way the dance was filmed - this wasn't a film about dance, and because he used nondancers in the key roles, sleight-of-hand was necessary.
Regardless of my personal views, your talk illuminated what fans of the film find so enthralling, and I thank you again for your penetrating, interesting analysis.Posted by Anonymous on 2010-12-13 16:30:11

Go back and look at Black Narcissus again. Sister Ruth does NOT start out as "pure and innocent." She's twitchy and resentlful from the start and bbecomes increasingly deranged as the film goes on.
Then go look at The Red Shoes again. P & P know how to shoot ballet. Darren Aronofsky does not. The camera is almost always right up in Portman's face. We only see her body when she displays scars -- and bleeds.
I found nothing of interest here outside of Mila Kunis' go-for-broke performance as an escapee from a Paul Verhoeven movie.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2010-12-13 14:52:54